It is wrong to conclude that ancient Tibetans did not know what loyalty was simply because their written language has no corresponding character for the Chinese word “忠”. This would be akin to say that a Chinese medical practitioner who discovers a new herb in the wild for medical use and returns many times to collect the herb and study it has no idea what the herb is until giving it a name or learning its name.
Which one of the following is an assumption required by the argument?
A) If one knows the name of something, one knows what that thing is. B) Naming something does not require knowing what that thing is for. C) The name used to identify something includes no information about the nature or function of the thing that is identified. D) A Chinese medical practitioner who repeatedly collects a wild herb and studies it has some idea of what the herb is even before knowing a name for the herb. E) People who are the first to figure out what something is know it better than those who only know the name of the thing.
Answer choice (C) is too strong. Although the author wants to distinguish knowing something from naming that something, there is no reason to prevent the chosen name from providing information about the nature of the thing without undermining the conclusion reached in the end. For example, 火车 is a perfect name for what it describes and one can still understand the in's and out's about that moving machine without giving it a name like 火车.
After all, a name is given to something so that it is easier to describe and represent that something when comparing with other similar things.
If you negate D, you would have the second sentence of the argument verbatim. If this is true, then according to the first sentence of the argument, Tibetans did not know what loyalty was. The whole argument falls apart.
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发表于 2010-11-30 05:27:38
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